big cheese

Questions about big cheese

What does big cheese mean?

big cheese means "an important influential person".

What is another word for big cheese?

Close synonyms include big shot, big gun, big wheel, big deal, big enchilada. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is big cheese a common word?

big cheese is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.